Interesting Views On Vista Sp1

[Beerman]

Here and Here

Zdnet carried out some tests of Vista SP1 with (who would of guessed it) good and bad results. In place of posting both articles, if you are interested the links are included.

My personal opinion having only installed SP1 beta on a test system is that I have had no problems. My boot times increased somewhat and my system did seem (no actual testing was done) faster especially when copying large files.

That said, my main Vista system will not see SP1 until some time as I feel it's actually worth it for me.

[Beerman]

ZDnet posted updated news on SP1 installs that were contrary to the earlier postings. Seems the user had hardware problems unrelated to the SP1 install.

 

 

 

On Wednesday, FedEx delivered DVDs containing the final, RTM bits of Windows Vista Service Pack 1. My colleagues George Ou and Adrian Kingsley-Hughes received similar packages at roughly the same time.

 

George was first out of the gate, reporting on his “near death” experiences with a desktop and a notebook PC. I was baffled when I read the original piece, which was completely at odds with every experience I’ve had with SP1 throughout its beta cycle and with the delivered RTM bits. The issue came into clearer focus later in the day, when George updated that original post to note that the problems he encountered had little or nothing to do with SP1. The notebook suffered a catastrophic hardware failure. And the desktop PC? As George notes much later in the story, “My desktop computer seems to be a lot healthier now after I installed Vista SP1.” George has since extensively updated the post, rewriting nearly every paragraph and acknowledging that several of his original speculations were incorrect. backtracking from almost every conclusion he drew originally. [see note at end of post.]

 

A few hours later, Adrian reported that his first SP1 installation “went without a hitch” and then followed up with a report that says “the promised performance gains are there.”

 

Meanwhile, over the past 24 hours I’ve been busy installing the RTM bits of SP1 on three different machines here, alongside three other machines that had already been upgraded via Windows Update with a release candidate that turned out to be the final build after all.

 

And guess what? It all just worked.

 

* On my main desktop system, a one-week-old Dell XPS 420 running Windows Vista Ultimate, the complete SP1 setup, start to finish, took just under 49 minutes from start (insert DVD, click OK on installer dialog box) to finish (at the Windows desktop, ready to work). It restarted three times during the installation.

* On my wife’s 18–month-old Acer notebook, also running Windows Vista Ultimate, I encountered a minor stumbling block yesterday morning when I first tried to install SP1. It stopped almost immediately, warning me that an installed language pack was incompatible the the version of SP1 I was trying to install. After some digging in Control Panel’s Regional and Language Options dialog box, I found the culprit. Last June I had installed the Italian and Spanish language packs on this machine, and the initial release of SP1 is only compatible with five languages: English, German, Japanese, French, and Spanish. (The all-language version will be ready in April.) After I removed the Italian language pack, SP1 install proceeded smoothly. I have no idea how long the actual installation took. When I came back 90 minutes later, the installation had completed and my wife was checking her e-mail and browsing the web. After a day of use, she reports no issues.

* My main Media Center PC, a year-old Dell XPS 410 that was upgraded with CableCARD support last October, just completed the upgrade. It took a grand total of 57 minutes, with no manual intervention required, and all of its Media Center functions, including communicating to a pair of Linksys extenders in other rooms, are working well.

 

The other three machines on which Vista SP1 is running are working properly, with no issues. For the last few months, I’ve been monitoring the private and public newsgroups carefully. Based on that feedback (thousands of hands-on reports), I know that my experience is typical. There is a known issue with some third-party drivers that don’t follow proper installation practices and can screw up an SP1 installation. That issue should affect a small percentage of Vista users, but it’s serious enough that Microsoft decided to delay the official release of SP1 by about six weeks. Aside from that issue, which will be fixed when the hardware companies release new drivers, I have seen very few SP1–related flaws.

 

Sadly, anyone who came to ZDNet yesterday read George’s inflammatory (and ultimately incorrect) post blaming SP1 for what actually turned out to be a hardware failure. How many people passed along those links? Quite a few, I suspect. How many people believed the incorrect information and concluded that SP1 is a buggy piece of crap? Too many. How many people came back and read George’s extensive corrections? How many people noted that the inflammatory original headline (“Death encounters with Vista SP1 RTM”) had been revised to the more prosaic and accurate “First experiences with Vista SP1 RTM”? Only a handful, I’m afraid.

 

I’ll be doing my benchmarking tests over the weekend and will post the results as soon as they’re ready. I’d rather be right than first.

 

[update: In an e-mail to me, George points out that he tried not to draw conclusions and did indeed point out that the problems might not have been related to SP1. After rereading his post, I agree with him. The trouble is, the original, inflammatory headline and the first two paragraphs leave the unmistakable impression that SP1 caused a “near death” and a “real death” experience for two computers. Hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of ZDNet newsletter subscribers will see only that headline and the blurb that goes with it, and they will, quite naturally, jump to conclusions. No matter how factual the complete post may have been, the short story it and the headline told was wrong.]

[Serge]

Good morning group! What all of this being said, I have a question for the Windoze gurus. Has anyone, in here, actually installed Vista ultimate successfully? How about SP1? How did it go?

 

I have a brand new box, well a few months old actually, on which I have installed XP pro, but I am interested in actually using the Vista CDs I purchased. I may even go with the 64-bit version.

 

Thanks for any comments! Good or bad!

[CLS]

Good morning group! What all of this being said, I have a question for the Windoze gurus. Has anyone, in here, actually installed Vista ultimate successfully? How about SP1? How did it go?

 

I have a brand new box, well a few months old actually, on which I have installed XP pro, but I am interested in actually using the Vista CDs I purchased. I may even go with the 64-bit version.

 

Thanks for any comments! Good or bad!

 

Certainly not a Windoze Guru but I have installed both Windows Ultimate and Windows Home Premium on my two desk tops with no (knock, knock) problems or hiccups. Maybe just lucky or maybe because, not being a Guru, I followed any and all instructions very carefully. One was an upgrade from Home Premium to Ultimate and the second from XP SP2 to Home Premium. Have no experience with SP1.

[Beerman]

I have Ultimate installed on 2 systems with one having a beta version of SP1 installed with no problems. Since 1 box is a test system for Microsoft, in the last 18 or so months, I've had to install various times (fresh) and each time I've had no problems. My personal system is a dual boot and I've reinstalled Vista twice, once because I feared a virus and another time I used an saved image. While I find I don't use XP as much I do feel a bit more secure knowing it's there should I need it so my opinion would be to dual boot if you can.

I've only got the 32bit installed as at the time, I was afraid of all the talk about driver issues that seemed to be nothing but that......talk.

[ggrussell]

I wouldn't bother with 64bit anything. There just aren't any REAL 64bit applications except perhaps a few games. I've seen more people complain about 64bit compatibility than any other version.

 

As for Vista drivers, check online for ALL HARDWARE you own before you install. I have a Sharp copier/printer/scanner mulitfunction device. I was told by Sharp tech support that they have no plans to support my model. Just the latest models although mine is only the previous model. That is my main printer so prevents me from using Vista for everyday work.

 

Appears that Micorsoft has also removed firewire printing support - at least in Vista Home Premium.

[Serge]

Thank you folks, for taking time to answer my question. Umm... the 64-bit version, what was I thinking!? I agree, there is practically nothing that runs on it. Since I am not a gamer, I will pass for now.

 

All the hardware I have was "certified" vista compatible when I purchased it. But indeed, I will download any recent driver/firmaware update before I begin the installation. System disk will be re-formated before installation, just to ensure a clean install.

 

So, from what I am reading and can understand, once vista is installed, it will automatically download the latest SP1 from M$?

 

Thanks!

 

[lynn98109]

Just a suggestion - instead of wiping your drive, buy a new one to replace it, and put the old one in an external enclosure, or even just leave it in the computer but not plugged in - Hard Drives are cheap, and that would be the quickest, easiest way to recover if you have problems.

 

It is possible to double-boot a computer, but I've been given conflicting info that "just set one for master, the other for slave" and "it's not quite that easy", so unless you have some tech support handy (friend, kid, whatever), I don't know if that's the way to go.

 

Lynn

[Serge]

Hi Lynn,

 

Thanks for your time and the suggestions! All 6 SATA drive ports are in use and I have 1 PATA drive in the system. See my system specs below. I will just do a backup to one of the data disks and see how it goes. I still have 2 more XP boxes running at the moment and 1 of them will be converted to Linux after this one is migrated to Vista. As for support, you are looking at him.

 

Last night, I ran the M$ utility for vista compatibility, and there are only 2 drivers that need to be upgraded. I believe they are available on the ASUS web site. I will, more than likely, make the jump when the official SP1 is made available by M$.

 

Stay tuned, more news at six!

 

Cheers!

 

 

 

Just a suggestion - instead of wiping your drive, buy a new one to replace it, and put the old one in an external enclosure, or even just leave it in the computer but not plugged in - Hard Drives are cheap, and that would be the quickest, easiest way to recover if you have problems.

 

It is possible to double-boot a computer, but I've been given conflicting info that "just set one for master, the other for slave" and "it's not quite that easy", so unless you have some tech support handy (friend, kid, whatever), I don't know if that's the way to go.

 

Lynn

[Serge]

Good morning folks!

 

As promised, more news at 6:00h.!

 

Since this past Friday, Vista-32 Ultimate is installed and working flawlessly, so far, on my system. Except for a slight blunder, on my part, at the beginning, the installation went well and only took 20 minutes, from inserting the DVD to loging in.

 

My blunder was that I had my SATA and RAID configurations set for IDE emulations. Of course, when I noticed that, I changed the BIOS to proper SATA and RAID configuration. Vista was not very happy... BSOD!! So, I had to re-install Vista, still another 20 minutes to loging on. TONS of updates to download and install.

 

My 2 mirror sets painlessly rejoined and I was ready for business in about 1 hour. So, far, I like what I see. I am now in the process of, very slowly, re-installing applications that are/were running on my XP box. I will probably have to upgrade some of them to Vista compatible version, but that's OK.

 

Cheers!